I hate to be not as much of a nerd here, but what's it to be upset about? Smallville went on for too long as it did, Clark faced pretty much he worst enemies before he even put on the cape, I doubt any of the viewers who stuck around for the show will actually pick up the book. And as much of a tease idea of having Steph there, the whole point of Smallville was set up for Clark to become Superman, a long drawn out soap-oprea drama prequel. And, lets face it, some us nerds would riot over how Barbara's time as Batgirl is skip for Steph.... though, granted, Justice League the Animated series managed to pull John Stewart while forcing Hal to be a temporal anomaly... and I doubt anyone but the ones deep in comics would care about Bette Kane...

Besides, would it have been worth it? When Zatana appeared, her powers were limited to granting birthday wishes, right? And also, that kid who became a superhero via cursed comic book was a clear representation of Captain Marvel (even in TV, the Big Red Cheese falls short)... who Clark has to fight (almost every other hero Clark somehow has to fight. Booster Gold. LoSH when they plan to kill Chloe when she was Brainiac) They would have the same, maybe have Steph being like a kid out to kill her father for ruining her and her mother's lives, she DID became Spoiler just to spite him in his new paradigm of super crime....

Just to be clear, yes; it is a bummer that we don't see Cass or Steph have some lime light of their own to highlight their character achievements, while the other legacy characters like Tim Drake, Jaime Reyes, Wally West, and Cassie Sandsmark get their chances to shine...

What happened was that they announced that Nightwing would be Stephanie Brown, a character that people have attachment to and who recently had an entertaining solo series, and so people who normally would not be that interested in Smallville became interested for the first time. Then what happened was that DC Editorial yanked that away, and insulted their readers' intelligence by saying "we only want the iconic characters", a reason that for the Batfamily has served to ruthlessly cut off every woman bar two, but somehow Damian is considered iconic. The reason why Babs was chosen in this instance was because art had already been released and it seems that DC Editorial has decided that there are only allowed to be two women associated with Batman: Batgirl and Batwoman. Everyone else? Too confusing! If you have too many women around it's just hard to keep track of them!

The upset comes about by the fact that there was finally an opportunity for DC to stop being sexist and expand the role of women in the Bat mythos, the writer was taking it ... and then DC Editorial snatched it away with an "oh lol we changed our minds, ONLY ICONIC CHARACTERS".

And I realise after all that I forgot about Helena Wayne over in Earth-2, but my point stands that DC's reasoning of "ONLY ICONIC CHARACTERS!!11" seems to fall disproportionally harshly on the batladies.

I'm sure DC would argue that Helena Wayne is the iconic version over Bertinelli. Their destruction (pretty much) of that ID (and it is a destruction until we see some evidence that Bertinelli could exist) is proof of that. It's like they want to rub salt in our wounds with this stuff.

What's it to be upset about? How about the fact that DC are so simple-minded that they think they need FIVE different takes on Barbara Gordon. Is that really necessary? And it's the way they've gone about it, too. I've seen some people attempting to justify how Didio's gone about it, saying that he's not the one who did this, but he's wanted Barbara as Batgirl for years, and after shuffling Paul Levitz out of his position, he got what he wanted. As such, it just appears incredibly spiteful when a Barbara Gordon supporter within DC is the one confirming the news that he wants her in Smallville out of iconography. Which is nonsense. The entire iconography argument is supposedly based on marketability and recognition factor; NONE of the versions of Barbara Gordon out there will even remotely resemble the version that the general public might even give a fuck about.

So it's just spiteful, and rather than being honest, we had some bullshit answer spewed at us when it's just clear favouritism on display. THAT'S why people are getting upset. Why does it take 'being a nerd' to support a character you like or get upset about treatment of them?

"Why does it take 'being a nerd' to support a character you like or get upset about treatment of them?"

It doesn't take any at all to support them. To get upset about their treatment does imply a certain amount of investment in a fictional character that tends to equate to... well, I would say geekery, not "being a nerd" but that's my own linguistic choice.

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